We also see that the result of this vast economic revolution has been almost wholly evil.
We see that this hundredfold increase of wealth, amply sufficient to provide necessaries, comforts, and all beneficial refinements and luxuries for our whole population, has been distributed with such gross injustice that the actual condition of those who produce all this wealth has become worse and worse, no efficient
arrangements having been made that from the overflowing abundance produced all should receive the mere essentials of a healthy and happy existence.
We have seen huge cities grow up, every one of them with their overcrowded, insanitary slums, where men, women, and children die prematurely as surely as though a body of secret poisoners were constantly at work to destroy them.
We see thousands of girls compelled by starvation to work in such an empoisoned environment as to produce horribly painful and disfiguring disease, which is often fatal in early youth, or in what ought to have been, and what might have been, the period of maximum enjoyment of their womanhood. And to this very day no efficient steps have been taken to abolish these conditions.
We see millions still struggling in vain for a sufficiency of the bare necessaries of life (which in their misery is all they ask), often culminating in actual starvation, or in suicide to which they are driven by the dread of starvation. Yet our Governments, selected from among the most educated, the most talented, the wealthiest of the country,
with absolute power to make what laws and regulations they please, and an overflowing fund of accumulated wealth to draw upon, do nothing, although more people die annually of want than are killed in a great war, and more children than could be slaughtered by many Herods.
And while all this goes on in the depths, where—
"Pale anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair"—